I heard about Failure quite a while ago, I even had one of their songs (a cover) on my computer long, long before I realised just how incredible they are as a band. They contributed a cover of “Enjoy the Silence” to a Depeche Mode tribute album, which my sister bought and ripped, which I then copied. It was a good cover; so good that even Depeche Mode like it better than their own version. I tried searching for some of their other stuff, but could find nothing, and gave up on it.

Fast forward several years, sometime after I discovered the Minibosses. At one point, they had a live cover of a song called “Golden” available for download from their website. I grabbed it because I was grabbing everything  they had up on the site, and there were few details available on the individual tracks. It was a neat song, but I had no idea who was responsible for the original. I tried searching for individual lyrics (I’ve had good success with that in the past), but came up empty. For all I knew, it was a Minibosses original in a more conventional alt-rock style. It’s live, and the ‘bosses were drunk, so the vocals are bad, the guitars are sloppy, and it’s a piss-poor recording. For some reason though, my wife really liked it. It’s unusual enough that she likes anything in that style, let alone a grainy live recording, so I tried to discover exactly what it was for her benefit. Whenever she does like something like that, I try to be as diligent as possible in accommodating her.

To that end, I emailed the Minibosses, asking them about it. To my pleasant surprise, they got back to me, letting me know that it was a cover of a Failure song. Now that I knew the band I thought I’d have better luck finding it. That was not at all the case; searching for Failure was pretty futile. It was almost as though they didn’t exist. In fact, what I did discover was that they did exist, but were now defunct, with almost no trace of them on the internet (at the time). I did find a few sites that mentioned them, and some bad samples of Golden that sounded just as bad as the Minibosses cover version (possibly thanks to the inferior WMA CODEC). So again, I’d given up.

Then one day, I got a mailer from Grant Henry, a.k.a. Stemage, the fellow responsible for the MetroidMetal project (of which I am a fan and sponsor). This mailer had information pertaining to a tribute project that he was working on to none other than Failure. Looking it up this time revealed a lot more information. It seems that the internet caught wind of them, and word-of-mouth had increased their fanbase a lot. They now had a detailed Wiki page, and a huge underground following. I found that a collection of their b-sides, demos, and rarities was even available for free download. Paydirt!

I got a chance to listen to this collection (a while ago) and I can confirm many of the things I’d read about them. I didn’t think that anyone made music like that anymore; they continued the evolution of great underground acts from the late 80’s and early 90’s (minus the mainstreaming). The best way I can think of to describe it, is that they sound like a “retro” indie-garage-rock act, the likes of which could have come from the Pacific Northwest scene circa 199x, and yet, at the same time, sounding like they come from 1,000 years in the future. The sound is very atmospheric, concentrating on creating texture and mood rather than on technical displays (though it’s evident in some tracks that they’re still capable of excellent musicianship). Long story short, they blew me away.

Posted by Ron as Music at 1:16 PM EDT

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When I was young, and first exposed to the marvel of Much Music, I began keeping a list. This list contained the band and sometimes album or song name of things I’d heard that I wanted to check out in greater detail. It grew and grew over the several years I’d kept it, and while I’d never made an exact count, I estimated that it may have contained as many as 2,000 entries.

Sadly, at some point, the battered blue spiral-bound over-sized notepad which contained this list became lost in time and space, possibly as the result of cleaning my room, or perhaps when I moved back upstairs from my windowless room in the basement. I don’t know exactly when it was lost, just that the next time I went to look for it, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I was pretty distraught over it, as it took me a long time to compile and at the time, could not easily be re-researched and compiled. I wrote the stuff down precisely for that reason.

It was probably just as well. I vividly recall crying myself to sleep one night after having made the realisation that I would probably never have the resources in time and money to follow through with my research. After all, at $20 per CD, just to sample the most acclaimed album from each band would have cost in excess of $40,000. Even if I were hunting through pawn shops, that still represented more money than I could ever commit to such a project. That list didn’t include movies either, and when you factor in that many of the groups on the list probably had more than one release worth buying, the cost grows rather quickly. The list was still growing at that time as well. The conclusion I was left with was that I would be constantly playing catch-up.

Then the internet happened. Napster. It was a dream come true. I downloaded a lot of stuff. I started keeping track again (though mostly just on scraps of paper). It was like a second shot at the dream, until the service was shut down by the lawsuits of a few wealthy artists whining about how they were missing out on revenue desperately needed to fund drug habits, psychiatrists, and whores.

Still, the genie was released from the bottle, and has to date proven impossible to put back. Things aren’t as easy as they were then, but looking this stuff up is still fairly trivial, as is keeping a list on my computer. It doesn’t have 2,000 entries or whatever, but factoring in all the bookmarks and everything, might be getting there. Wikipedia helps a lot too.

And that’s one of the many things I’ve been using to occupy my time whilst I’ve been  away from work. I’ve also taken the time to rip many of my old CDs to MP3. I hadn’t realised how many of them were not on my computer until recently. I think that was a result of being storage-limited before. Now I have more space than I know what to do with.

Posted by Ron as Computers, Music at 6:58 PM EDT

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My sister just pointed me to an amzing discovery, after years of searching, mostly in vain. Mystery Machine still exist. For a long time they were one of my favourite bands, and Canadian to boot. My friend and bandmate Derek taped one of their videos on Much Music’s City Limits program (you know, the one that came on at 1 in the morning, where they aired all the noisy feedback guitar bands not suitable for regular rotation). That had to be sometime around winter 1993-1994.

I had a copy of their first record, Glazed, on cassette, and I played it to death. Unfortunately, everything they put out after that wasn’t quite as good in my opinion, but they’re still better than pretty much any radio-friendly band in the genre out there today. I guess that’s part of the problem; they got more radio friendly, and also, there aren’t many other bands in that genre, and certainly very few that get airplay.

Rock on!!!

Posted by Ron as Music at 12:13 PM EDT

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So today is the Vernal Equinox. The weather was not encouraging today; dismal and headache-inducing. But maybe with the spring weather will come some welcome change.

I’ve been back in Sault Ste. Marie for almost 3 full months now, and I have yet to find a job. Somehow I thought it would be different this time. I returned full of confidence, with new skills, a better attitude, and more experience. I guess I should have known better. Last time I lived here, it took me 6 full years of looking (to be fair, it was on-and-off looking) to find something, and that something started at minimum wage.

Sure, there are jobs out there, but everyone around here wants one of two things; they either want someone who will work for next-to-nothing, or someone with 5+ years experience and fully trained. There doesn’t seem to be a happy medium. Call it the “Soo Factor” for lack of a better term. That’s kind of catchy. I think I’ll go with it.

Mind you, it comes off as an excuse, which I suppose it is, but after a search as demoralising as this one has been thus far, I have to tell myself something in order to keep looking.

Since I’ve not been working, I’ve had plenty of spare time, ok, too much spare time. I started that CoC campaign that I mentioned in the last post. First session seemed to go over pretty well. We’ll see how that develops. I’ve also been dumping a lot of time into the D&D campaign that Meghan has been running. It just keeps getting better all the time; defintely a weekly highlight for me. I never realised how much I’d missed gaming until I went without for a year and a half.
Let’s see, what else?

I’ve found out about at least 3 more retarded internet fads this year. The Terrible Secret of Space was pretty amusing; by the same fellow responsible for the silly Zero Wing remix that made the rounds a while ago, and almost as funny. Almost.

Also been linked to a euro DJ putting out CDs under the name Basshunter. Now, I’m not a huge fan of techno usually, especially clubbin’ shit, but this is pretty catchy, pop-y stuff. It’s cute. And from what I’ve heard so far, all of it very nerdy. I guess that’s what makes it endearing. That, and the fact that it’s in Swedish, so I can’t understand how crappy the lyrics are. So far, I’ve heard two tracks, the first one, ‘Boten Anna,’ about a mIRC chat bot called Anna, whom it is discovered, is a real person. The other was about playing in a Warcraft 3 clan on a map called Defense of the Ancients, or DotA for short. Not phenominal, and so campy it hurts, but it was good for a chuckle.

Then there’s the Decemberists. I’ve heard a lot about them in the past year or so, but I never got around to checking them out, until yesterday when Robin Ward posted a link to one of their songs. I figured they’d be overblown, and that was pretty much bang-on. Nothing impressive or special about them, IMHO.

I realise that opinion lacks credibility, because, yeah, I am a nobody, but also because of its juxtaposition immediately following what was essentially a positive review of some cheesy eurotechno. So be it, I guess. I’ll follow it with something equally damaging.

A Shoggoth on the Roof; a musical pardoy of Fiddler on the Roof, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. It’s funny; that’s really all there is to say about it. I’m not otherwise inclined to watch/listen to musicals, but if someone put this on, I’d go. Someone actually tried to, apparently, but were sued into submission. The suit wouldn’t hold up, since parody is clearly fair use, but the company putting it on didn’t have the cash to fight back, so the world loses. Score another one for the tyranny.

What else is there? I guess a hundred little things, but none of them terribly important.

My car is still busted, and Meghan’s is falling apart. The old Dodge is still kicking, but it needs a lot of work before it’s trustworthy again, and I don’t feel like spending the money on it. It needs a new waterpump, which requires taking half the engine apart to get at. It’s a dumb design from that standpoint. I’d contemplated that if the pump ever went critical, I’d just do an engine swap, but at this point, it isn’t even worth it. It’s got some nasty rust starting on one of the rocker panels, and we honestly don’t need three cars. It’s ridiculous, really.

If anything, I want to get rid of two of them and get something newer and more reliable. I’ll keep my Alice, because it would be stupid to sell her after just spending almost $8k on a tranny swap; I’d never recover the investment. Besides, I still like that car, and it’s in decent enough shape. Still needs a new gearbox o-ring and now something is leaking coolant again. I think it might be coming from the lower rad hose, and also from the cap. I guess I’ll try replacing both and see if that helps. Still waiting on new suspension parts, too. I’m trying to time it so that I can have all the major stuff done at once, by Planet Motorsport in Guelph. We’ll see, I guess.

Wow, this post ent up being longer than I expected. I’ll try to post more often. I have no excuse besides laziness, and though valid as any other, it doesn’t make me feel any better about it.

I think the length of this post comes from a growing sense of disconnection from society and a build up of feelings of isolation. Seems odd, since I live with my fiancée and two of my good friends, but there you have it.

Whenever I start feeling like this, I always instinctively reach into my past. I try googling people I knew and find myself wishing that more of them were present and accounted for on the web. I’ve discussed this with Luke before, and he thinks it’s a bit foolish. I can see his reasoning. If they never bothered to keep in touch, then they weren’t good friends in the firstplace. It makes some amount of sense, but at the same time, if that were a universal truth, there wouldn’t be places like classmates and other crap like that. I’ve no intention of falling into that trap, but still.

Maybe this all started again when I called my old friend Trevor, after he called my parents house and left a drunken message on New Years’ Eve. I called him and we made plans; he was coming to the Soo from North Bay and we were going to go for coffee or something, but he never showed and he never called. I know there could be a million reasons for it, considering the nature of his visit here, but still, he could have called. So this is where I’m supposed to just say, “fuck you, I don’t care” or something, right?

I can’t do it though. It’s not like I’d even look for anything meaningful; I just want to know what people are up to. Everyone should keep a blog. Okay, that’s clearly not going to happen, and probably for the best. All it would likely do is make me feel worse about myself. I do, in fact, realise how pitiful that sounds.

Well, before this starts sounding like my young emo cousin’s webpage, I’d better quit writing. Out.

Posted by Ron as Fire-in-a-can, Games, Miscellaneous, Music, Work at 8:05 PM EDT

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I write this in case anyone actually wants to hear about it, even though there won’t be much to it

I haven’t been up to much. Unemployment can be pretty dull, though I admit, I really needed a break. My last job was pretty brutal on me, physically, psychologically, and emotionally. I should have blogged the whole thing, as my ‘mentor’ was pretty rotten towards me in the end, and it would have been interesting to track how he grew to be that way. But, I didn’t, so you get the abbreviated version, above.

I’m probably going to go back to my old job, though there is always the possibility that we will be moving again, so who knows. Crap like this is why I’m glad I keep a rainy day fund. You can’t always rely on EI, as in this case, I’ve been fired rather than laid off, so I can’t claim. Actually, half the time when I could, I didn’t bother (like last year).

So, in my boredom, I’ve been playing lots and lots of video games to pass the time. Finally got around to beating Front Mission 4, then promptly started “New Game+” and got about as far as I had before I stopped last time. I’m anxiously awaiting news of the North American localisation of FM5, though not holding my breath.

I also played through a few hacked SNES ROMs; a superb Japanese Super Metroid hack called ‘Legacy’ which completely changes the game map, basically making it a new game entirely. Took 11 hours for me to get through it. I played a few other Super Metroid hacks, but one was a poorly thought out rearranging of the power ups, and the other was an annoyingly hard challenge hack (though it was otherwise well done).

The other major hack I played is a complete redesign of Super Mario World, called Super Demo World, which is essentially a showcase for the capabilities of the author’s own world-editing tool for the game. And when I say complete redesign, I mean it’s almost unrecognisable, just the game engine remains. New worlds, new map, new levels, new items, everything. Oh, and it’s also 12 times larger. Before patching the ROM, you have to expand it from 4 Megabit to 48. Amazing, but also very hard.
Then I went on to play a good chunk of the way through a translation patch for Dragon Quest V, which was never formally released here. Great game so far (I’m about halfway through), much better than DQVII, even though the graphics are a little sub-par for a SNES game. When finished I am also going to have a go at DQVI, which is also supposedly translated to the point of being completely playable, and understandable, in English, as well as being much nicer-looking (think Final Fantasy VI). Of course, all that is doing, is making me want to go buy DQVIII, which is only about 40$ brand new everywhere now.

In the meantime, my sister also bought ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds’ for the Gamecube for 10$ from a clearance bin at the Superstore. Surprisingly good game. It’s a 3rd person 3D beat-em-up style game, which although somewhat held back by the GC graphics capability, still manages to be a lot of fun to play. Most franchise games like that are dreadful, but this one isn’t. Maybe it’s because I like the show. It doesn’t hurt that most of the voice acting is done by the actors from the series, the only exceptions being Willow/Allison Hannigan and Buffy/Sarah Michelle Gellar, though the person that voices Buffy in the game sounds just like her. Can’t say the same for Willow, but even if she doesn’t sound exactly like her, she still talks the same. A for effort.

I’ve also started back into Warcraft III, and polished off another dozen missions or so. It’s a pretty good game, and I particularly enjoy that it has a difficulty setting, making it accessible to casual RTS players, like me, while still providing some challenge to genre veterans. I’m playing it because it’s a good game, not because of any love for the RTS format; I much prefer turn-based strategy.

Also played the demo for Return to Castle Wolfenstein out of sheer boredom. The first level where you actually escape from the castle was awesome. The second level where you must escape the catacombs beneath the castle was stupid. Skeletons and Zombies and Flame Demons, oh my! What a pile of crap. That’s been done before in other games, and done better, in my opinion. Thief: The Dark Project comes immediately to mind. Though the fact that these undead warriors can deflect your bullets back at you with their shields is kind of neat.

I haven’t been just playing games. I watched some movies, too. Last night’s selection was 50 First Dates, which I thought was cute. Odd for me, since I usually find romantic comedies to be vomit-inducing. On that note, I also watched Wedding Crashers recently, and that was pretty hilarious. Also caught Starsky and Hutch, which I thought was mostly lame, though it had its moments.

Two of the movies I recently watched were very similar, which is interesting in that one of them is a huge success and the other, not so much. The two in question are National Treasure and the Da Vinci Code. The plot and pacing of these two movies are very similar. Both were decent enough movies, but the only reason the latter did so much better is because of the hype, though I will admit that there was good enough reason for it; the Da Vinci Code novel is much better than the movie (though I still found it to be contrived, predictable, and factually inaccurate at times, despite claims to the contrary). To the credit of the former, however, I actually much prefer Nicholas Cage to Tom Hanks.

Last, but certainly not least, I watched Grandma’s Boy, which, if you’re a nerd, and you like video games, this ’stoner movie’ may just be one of the funniest things you’ll ever see. So stupid, so funny. Though it is shameless. I will not let my parents watch it. It also features a really, really cool Aphex Twin song called Windowlicker.

So other than that, I’ve just been doing a lot of reading. Luke sent me a nice torrent of a bunch of out-of-print Palladium RPG books for TMNT and Robotech, so that has taken much of my time this weekend.

Oh, and my car got broken into again. This time it was in the parking garage of my apartment building. I don’t even know when it happened; it had been sitting for about two weeks when I discovered the damage. Same car as last time, the Dodge Stratus. Chrysler products are a car thief’s wet dream, though both times the GTA gangsta-wannabe failed. In retribution, they stole the chromed valve stem caps from my tires. It cost 3$ to replace them from Canadian Tire. Talk about pathetic. Oh and they also left their nasty gangsta-approved nike athletic t-shirt, complete with stinky gangsta cologne smell mixed with sweat on the seat. Now the whole car smells like that. Good thing the body shop at Oxford Dodge shampoos the interior when they’re done. In any case, I think I’ll get rid of it for real this time.

Posted by Ron as Fire-in-a-can, Games, Media, Miscellaneous, Music, TV & Movies, Work at 12:20 PM EDT

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I was going to write about a really nifty festival that happens yearly here in London, in Victoria Park, called Sunfest. I had taken a bunch of digital pics, and that was to be the focus of the entry. Sadly, none of them turned out to my satisfaction. I didn’t actually post due to sheer laziness.

In any case, the festival was mostly enjoyable. Too many people; the crowd was so thick you practically had to shove your way through the park. Despite that, it was pretty neat. It went all weekend long and features music and food from around the sunnier parts of the world.

Among the more enjoyable acts, a drum group from Korea called Jeng Yi, and my personal favourite of the weekend, Niyaz. I liked Niyaz so much that I bought their CD. If you like the arabian sound, I definitely recommend you check them out. Though they are much better in person.

Anyway, no pictures, but a finished post at last.

Oh, and I got to try curried goat. Pretty tasty!

Posted by Ron as Food, Music at 10:23 AM EDT

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If you have to be a consumer, might as well do your part and make your opinion about products known. Companies actually pay marketing firms for this information. To entice people to participate, they even offer perks every once in a while.

Meghan often participates in these surveys, not out of the hope of a reward, but rather for the first reason I mentioned, however, perks don’t hurt either. She recently participated in one such survey on hotspex.com, one of the usual sites she receives invitiations from. They have a points program which you can redeem for contest entry ballots, savings coupons, or donate to charity. To encourage you to complete the surveys, particularly the longer ones, they feature a Wheel-of-Fortune-style wheel, rendered in flash, in which you can win stuff. Usually, it’s just bonus points, but they also have an iPod up for grabs.

Meghan hit the jackpot last week; she won the iPod. It’s a 1GB iPod nano, with her name engraved on the back, though they misspelled it. Neat to win, but we never would have bought one otherwise, for several reasons. Firstly, they’re overpriced. Secondly, I have precisely zero interest in itunes. Thirdly, they’ve become disgustingly trendy. Almost as bad as big sunglasses.

So in keeping with the ‘iTunes sucks’ mentality, we looked for options with this thing. The first thing I could think of was eBay, but with an engraving on the back, resale would be much less than retail value. That’s when we found out that you can load non-Apple firmware on these puppies, which unlock their true potential. No more DRM bullshit, no more being locked into using iTunes, no more format restrictions.
We found a couple different firmwares to try, the first of which was iPodlinux. As expected, installation was a little kludgey, but we made it through. We had to disable apple’s annoying utility that blocks non-itunes transfers to the device, but once done, you’re free to make a new ext2 partition and install away. So we got that in there, only to discover that mp3 support (via podzilla), while enabled, was rather primitive. You can do lots of other things with it, and has great skinning support out of the box (the Amiga themes are particularly nice), but primarily, I still wanted to use it as a music player for my 1-hour-each-way commute to and from work every day.

By suggestion from somewhere on the ipodlinux.org website, we decided to try Rockbox instead. A quote from the Rockbox website really says it best. While not as easily made pretty as iPodLinux, its music player works far better, and is easier to transfer songs to.

So, now we have 3 different firmwares to choose from on boot, and 768MB left to store music and other files, which is plenty for my immediate purposes. Did I mention that it plays Doom?

Posted by Ron as Computers, Music at 7:48 PM EDT

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Just took in a Nine Inch Nails show at the John Labatt Centre. This is the third time I’ve seen them live, though it’s been over 10 years since the last time. They have yet to disappoint me; the light show alone was worth the price of admission. They covered all the ‘classics’ right up to some material from the latest release, though even the old songs weren’t boring, as they often end up sounding like a mild remix when done live.

One interesting thing I’ve heard of but never witnessed until tonight: normally at rock shows, when a band plays a ballad, slower song, rocking anthem, or anything introspective, the crowd will flick their lighters; it’s a ‘thing.’ Well, at a NIN show, as you might expect, a lot of people substituted their cell phones for lighters, so there was this sea of both orange flame, and blue-backlit LCD. First time I’d heard of that was from a live recording of the video game cover band, the Minibosses, at MAGfest. Definitely not something I saw at the NIN shows of last decade, though it is fitting.

Anyway, that’s it for me; sleepy time, work tomorrow.

Posted by Ron as Music at 11:48 PM EST

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…and it was good. Just got back from the show: Devin Townsend Band, and Dark Tranquility opening for Opeth. Awesome show. Everybody was super cool, and interacted a lot with the crowd, made possible by the small-ish nature of the venue (a little dive called Cowboys, formerly The Drink).
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Ron as Music at 1:39 AM EST

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One of the nice things about living here in London is that there are quite a few concerts. Not as many as Toronto, but way more than in the Soo, certainly, and artists of higher calibre, usually. Windsor had a lot more as well, but for the most part, I had to go to Detroit to cash in on it, and that made it not worth my while since I don’t like crossing the border. The US, and Detroit specifically are frightening places to me.

In the end, I passed up seeing Nobuo Uematsu conducting the Detroit Symphony because I didn’t want the hassle of crossing the border. The same reason I didn’t go to the Detroit Auto Show last year. I wanted to, but it just wasn’t worth it.

That brings me to this year, in London. Two great shows coming up: Opeth at a small venue called ‘The Drink’ on February 28. I’ve already got tickets, courtesy of a friend of mine from work (thanks, Dev!). We’re the only two there who seem to appreciate death metal. The second show in question is Nine Inch Nails at the John Labatt Centre in early March. I’ve seen NIN twice before (in 1994 at Molson Park, and again in 1995 at Pine Knob in Michigan), and they put on a good show both times, so I expect this one to be just as good.

Posted by Ron as Music at 9:36 PM EST

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